TheSunnyMag: Traveling Salesperson – the most misunderstood problem

Here goes our weekly magazine of curated stories from around the world. In this edition: Why Steven Sinofsky Really Left Microsoft. Social Media Is Making You a Smarter Leader. How the Internet is Shaping Our “Global Brain”. Facing Irrelevance, Microsoft Tries to Reinvent Everything and more.

Inc.

Why Steven Sinofsky Really Left Microsoft: About every six weeks, a small group of Microsoft (MSFT) executives gathers at a Seattle restaurant to talk strategy. The location varies, but the cast of characters tends to stay the same: Don Mattrick, the head of the division that produces the Xbox, will be there sitting alongside Qi Lu, the head of search and advertising, as well as top executives from the mobile team. “If Qi is paying, it’ll be somewhere very cheap,” Mattrick joked in an interview last year. More here.

Newnewworld

Social Media Is Making You a Smarter Leader: Strategy consultant Dorie Clark blogs on the Harward Business Review on how the social media is prompting us to become better people and smarter leaders. We sell better, we listen better, and we move faster because we are on social media she writes. Read more here.

Data Bartering Is Everywhere: Noam Bardin wanted to expand the reach of his company’s mobile mapping app to South America. It was a bold idea, but an expensive one. So over the past year, Bardin, the chief executive officer of Palo Alto-based Waze, met with resellers of geographical mapping information and asked them for access to their proprietary data. The catch: The Israeli entrepreneur said that he didn’t want to pay a dime to get it, Mark Milian writes for the Bloomberg Businessweek. Read more here.

Entrepreneuring

As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living: Shawn and Stephanie Grimes spent much of the last two years pursuing their dream of doing research and development for Apple, the world’s most successful corporation. But they did not actually have jobs at Apple. It was freelance work that came with nothing in the way of a regular income, health insurance or retirement plan. Instead, the Grimeses tried to prepare by willingly, even eagerly, throwing overboard just about everything they could. Read more here.

Technicolor

How the Internet is Shaping Our “Global Brain”: The South Africans have a beautiful philosophy called Ubuntu, which translates as “I am what I am because of who we all are.” This is a perfect way to think about the way a brain develops, influenced by its surrounding people and experiences. It’s also how we should think about the way the Internet is developing, and about the way our choices in how we use technology are shaping this global brain. For both the brain and the Internet, networks are always binding us in new ways and changing our understanding of who we are and how we perceive the world. If we believe that the Internet comparatively is in the same critical stage of early development as a child, making as many connections as possible, then we need to be mindful of how we’re building its foundation. Tiffany Shlain, the author of Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks writes. Read more here.

The Traveling salesperson problem isn’t NP complete at all: Everyone who has done engineering would have heard of this problem “given a graph of cities various distances away from each other, find the shortest path for a salesperson to visit every city exactly once and return to the origin city.” Nomachetejuggling blog explains the fundamentals. (Alert: Only for geeks.) Read more here.

Gadgetvice

Facing Irrelevance, Microsoft Tries to Reinvent Everything: Mark Rogowsky takes a look at Microsoft’s latest moves. It’s hardly news to say that Microsoft‘s dominance of the PC era is one of the great business success stories of all time. That said, if you bought the stock midway through Bill Clinton‘s second term, your shares are worth about what you paid for them. And just as it seemed the Redmond, Wash. software giant had gotten over that 14-year valuation hangover — the forward P/E is just above 8 — Microsoft found itself in a world where the PC was no longer the center of the information universe. Read more here.

Big picture

Twitter no longer needs developer community support

“Thank you for reaching out to get clarification on our developer policies. As you know, we discourage developers from building apps that replicate our core user experience (aka “Twitter clients”). We know that there are developers that want to take their passion for Twitter and its ecosystem to unique underserved situations. As such, we have built some flexibility into our policy with regard to user tokens – which went into effect September 5th, 2012.”

Israel, Twitter, and the Line Between Free Speech and Violence: If you’ve been following the social-media campaign recently unleashed by the Israeli army on a multitude of platforms—from Twitter and Facebook (FB) to Instagram and Tumblr—as part of its attack on Hamas guerillas in the Gaza Strip, you know that we are seeing the birth of a whole new way of experiencing a war: in real time, and with live reports from the combatants themselves. But while some might argue that more information about such events is good, it also highlights just how much of our perception of such a conflict comes to us through proprietary platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and YouTube (GOOG). What duties or responsibilities do they have (if any) to monitor or regulate that information? More by Mathew Ingram on Gigaom here.

Hard Times Could Create a Tech Boom: Technology isn’t letting a good crisis go to waste. The crisis is global economic uncertainty, which several tech companies and analysts say is crimping spending by corporations. That enterprise spending still represents most of the tech industry. If the corporate restraint gets too severe, it can cause a recession not just in tech, but in the global economy. Read more by Quentin Hardy here.

Lifehack

5 Rules For API Management:APIs are the glue that connect apps. It’s as true for consumer apps as it is for the enterprise. API management platforms have come into vogue as apps proliferate across the enterprise. As APIs rise in importance, so has the need for better practices in their creation, development and management. All the major API management services have built strategies that they use as guiding principles when working with customers. Read more about API management from Mashery CEO Oren Michels here.